Catch-All Email Accounts
If you have a web hosting account, with one or more domains hosted on it, then you probably have several email accounts set up, too.
Let’s say that you have a domain, www.MyDomain.com, and have created a few mail accounts; your.name@MyDomain.com, sales@MyDomain.com, and support@MyDomain.com.
What happens if somebody sends an email to accounts@MyDomain.com? There is no email account with that name, so there is no mailbox to store it in.
The answer is that it goes into the hosting account “catch-all” account mailbox. The mail account name is usually the same as your hosting account name, so if you log in with the name “johndoe”, then your catch-all email account will be johndoe@MyDomain.com.
You will find that once you’ve had your domain for just a few weeks, you’ll start getting spam messages sent to non-existent email addresses at your domain. These messages will end up in your catch-all mailbox.
I usually set up my email program to delete the messages in the catch-all account. Whenever I pick up my email, the catch-all account gets emptied, and I never see all that spam. (Take note, spammers – it all gets deleted, so why bother sending it?)
When I upgraded my PC with a new hard disk a few months ago, I forgot to set up the catch-all account handler. I finally remembered yesterday, and discovered there were 83,331 spam messages in there, occupying some 231Mb of disk space.! It took about 2 hours to delete them all.
Most catch-all accounts have an unlimited mailbox size, so if you don’t empty them regularly, they will just eat up your hosting disk space. I estimate that my catch-all account is receiving about 1000 spam messages per day, so it soon bulds up if not cleaned out regularly.
So if you don’t do it already, check your catch-all account and clean it out regularly. You don’t want to fill your hosting account disk with spam.
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